Mad Libs¶
The books were printed with such cheap paper. Flimsy unbleached pages with all those underlined blanks. I think we first did them in class—as a lesson in the parts of speech—but we saw their true potential. What's the dirtiest verb a ten year old can think of. The joy was in relinquishing control. We wouldn't have cared if we had written the stories ourselves. But allowing the mad lib machine to construct a story for you could double us over with laughter.
ELIZA & SmarterChild¶
I remember it as a museum exhibit: Talk to ELIZA. I was a child. Computers were chunky and beige. ELIZA was already in her thirties. You could type to her, and lines of text would appear beneath. The novelty quickly wore off. The mechanism too obvious. "Tell me more about fuck you eliza."
SmarterChild came later. There was a sense of such technological promise, right up until you actually started talking to it. A conversation only in the most technical sense. Such vapid back and forth. Once you could sense the limits it wasn't fun anymore.
PoMo Generator¶
In 2010 I was in college. Someone showed me a website that automatically generates post modern drivel. At the time, I took great pleasure in reading post modern drivel. The texts this website produced hovered near the edge of intelligibility, but fell just short enough that it felt pointless to spend any time actually reading what it produced. What I wanted was to be visited, in the extra-terrestrial sense.